When first responders are called to an emergency, they typically benefit from having accurate and up-to-date information about the nature of the emergency and the location where it occurred. This often includes information like building blueprints, handling instructions for any on-site hazardous material, or other time-sensitive data. This information can also include documents or other references that must be delivered in picture or video form, such as the aforementioned blueprints.
Some existing solutions for providing information to first responders has made use of television broadcast channels. For example, software is available that enables the distribution of encrypted video or picture files, or other large files, over a local broadcast television station to targeted computer devices, using a process called “datacasting.” Providing information via broadcast television channels has certain advantages; for instance, since broadcast television infrastructure, such as high power transmitters and low power gap filler repeaters, effectively covers almost all areas of the United States, repurposing a portion of this for public safety use allows emergency responders to make use of existing infrastructure. Datacasting's ability to encrypt content and target specific receivers also allows users to create segregated paths so that multiple users cannot see what others are doing. Those pathways can also be broken when desired to share information across agencies, improving interoperability. Since datacasting natively uses a one-to-many broadcast content delivery method, it also does not suffer from bandwidth congestion, as many unicast/one-to-one broadcasting methods (such as 3G and 4G wireless telecommunications networks) do.
However, existing datacast technology has suffered from certain drawbacks. One major drawback is the fact that television broadcasting typically utilizes communications that are one-way, not two-way, and as such the system typically only allows for one-way and not two-way distribution of content. Emergency personnel can receive information, but have little ability to send or share any of their own via the same channels, which makes information sharing between on-site emergency personnel more difficult. There are also difficulties with aggregating data between multiple sources; for example, there can be difficulties in aggregating data from multiple different agencies, each of which uses a different source or series of sources, without taking the time to duplicate all of the data possessed by each agency for the source material or content of each agency.